As one who has recently made the transition to online accounting system from having the software based on a third party's PC; one who charged us every time data was entered and even for fixing any data entry errors, I'm sold on the idea, especially for small organisations.

But the accounting profession is about as conservative as you can get - its what we pay them for and when they get "creative" or "innovative" we ALL get into deep trouble - so you might expect some resistance when you rush in with the idea to your CFO, accoutnay, auditor or treasurer. AccountingWEB.co.uk has the lowdown Accountants bring Cloud summit down to earth [Read more →]

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Thanks to the folks at eRider for this reminder on the role that IT plays in governance and financial accountability. Auditors watching how organisations manage IT risks.

As It systems become critical to daily operations, they also become critical to the survivability of any organisation that comes to depend on them, not just on a daily basis, but on much broader time scales.

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Robert L. Weiner at Idealware has a good rundown on using the right tool to manage your donor records and, tempting though it may be - you already have it and you might even be quite good at using it - that tool is not Excel or its sisters. Back Away From That Spreadsheet:

Excel seems like it might be a great fit to manage your donor data. But ... there’s a lot of reasons why it’s not a good idea.

[...] Put down that spreadsheet and get a database that is designed to track donations.

... Excel stores information in what’s called a “flat file” database. This means it’s not designed to handle relationships between data, such as when one record (like a donor) needs to link to several other records (like gifts). And it doesn’t provide a wide variety of features that make tracking efficient and less error prone. What does this mean for you in practice?

As soon as you get another gift from the same person, you must either add a new column for the gift or add a new row for the donor. Adding a new column makes it hard to total and to find gifts by date, but if you include the donor in your spreadsheet more than once, the list is difficult to use for mailings.

[...] You cannot easily link pledges to payments, or track “soft credits” such as crediting individuals for corporate matches or gifts made through their family foundations ... relationships between constituents, such as spouses with separate records, members of households, or employment relationships.

... databases will turn to piles of mush (to use the technical term) without constant vigilance. ... Excel does not provide a rich array of tools to maintain data integrity.

... It can also be cumbersome to analyze Excel data for complex patterns, such as looking for donors have given for over five years, have a cumulative giving level of over $10,000, and attended more than two of your events.

[...] Finally, if your fundraising program is successful, your spreadsheet can grow impractically large. Spreadsheets with thousands and thousands of records become hard to view, print, or manipulate.

How do you manage your donor records, are you stuck in a spreadsheet or do you have a working database? Have you tried any of the specialist tools and how do they work?

Has your organisation tried to engage with many smaller donors or do you depend on just 2 or 3 institutions to stump up large chunks of money?

In the USA, from small charities tro major political parties, the Internet is prioving an excellent way to find and aggregate many thousands of small donors who would not be worth pursuing by traduitional means; how likely is that to work in NZ and how should we go about it?

Suggestions always welcome in the comments

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Facebook has tried to reach break-even financially with advertising but, even with the huge numbers of people spending time on the site, this hasn't yet been the winner. The other route to Internet profitability is transactions, either selling stuff yourself, like Amazon and Dell, or enabling others to do business on sites such as TradeMe.

So its not a surprise to find that in a "friendly" atmosphere such as facebook, transactions are the next big thing. The main problem with that is that Facebook itself is a venue for scams, phishing and identity theft, giving them your credit card details might be a big ask as Chris Crum makes clear. Facebook eCommerce May Have to Clear Security Obstacle

Security firm Trend Micro has been researching malicious practices on Facebook, and has discovered numerous rogue apps on the social networking site this week. They've been alerting Facebook of them as they find them, but apparently more keep popping up as fast as they are eliminated.

... With all of the apps circulating around Facebook, it's got to be hard to keep track of what all are legitimate ones anyway. Perhaps even scarier is that some seemingly legitimate apps are possibly being hacked into for malicious intent anyway.

Trend Micro offers the following advice:

• Always check the URL displayed in your browser’s address bar before entering any sensitive information.
• Check the true destination of a link before clicking it, by hovering your mouse pointer over it. If it looks suspicious, don’t click it.
• If you’re a Facebook user, now would be a good time to go and review your privacy settings and clear out any applications you no longer use.

Malicious Facebook Apps

A report this week from the Web Hacking Incidents Database (WHID) found that 19% of hacking incidents occurred on social networks in the first half of this year. They were the most heavily-targeted vertical.

Perhaps the scariest part of this entire situation is that Facebook has just started allowing developers to sell physical goods through apps. This means, we are likely going to see a lot of businesses selling goods directly on Facebook. This has the potential to be huge for eCommerce, but security concerns are already one obstacle to successful eCommerce on the web in general. The more reports of malicious happenings regarding Facebook, the more scared people will be to buy goods through the network.

[...] Consider how often people are already logged into Facebook. They're even taking it with them to other sites via things like Facebook Connect, the Fan Box, etc. There's good reason for people to want to use Facebook to complete online shopping transactions, strictly from the convenience standpoint.

Trust is another standpoint however. It is good to see that Facebook is responding so quickly to known threats, but something will have to be done to eliminate them, or at least greatly reduce them for Facebook's payment platform to really take off.
Facebook Payments

Are you ready to trust social sites with your credit card details? If you ask people for money in the form of donations or purchases, how do you earn their trust? Comments are open.

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OK, this is a bit of a long bow but its interesting to see that some work done by 415Forum a few years ago still holds good. Why Buy Local & Ten Reasons to Shop Local First [Read more →]

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